I Feel I'm Discovering Something New, A

Bodies Count, Of Course - They Count More Than We're Willing To Admit - But We Don't Fall In Love With Bodies, We Fall In Love With Each Other. We All Know That, But The Moment We Go Beyond A Catalogue Of Surface Qualities And Appearances, Words Begin To Fail Us, To Crumble Apart In Mystical Confusions And Cloudy, Unsubstantial Metaphors.

Memory And The Imagination Are Almost Identical. It's The Same Place In The Brain And The Same Thing Is Happening. When You Think About Your Own Life, There Are No Memories Without Place. You Are Always Situated Somewhere. I Think The Imagination - The Narrative Imagination At Least - Situates You In A Specific Space When You Start To Think Of A Story. I Often Use Places I Know. I Put My Characters Inside Rooms And Houses That I'm Familiar With - Sometimes The Houses Of My Parents Or Grandparents Or Previous Apartments I've Lived In.

I Think Most Writers Can't Really Think About Their Work Without A Kind Of Revulsion. And I Think That's Probably Why We Keep Going Back And Trying Again, Trying To Do Better Each Time.

And That's Why Books Are Never Going To Die. It's Impossible. It's The Only Time We Really Go Into The Mind Of A Stranger, And We Find Our Common Humanity Doing This. So The Book Doesn't Only Belong To The Writer, It Belongs To The Reader As Well, And Then Together You Make It What It Is.

I Guess I Wanted To Leave America For Awhile. It Wasn't That I Wanted To Become An Expatriate, Or Just Never Come Back, I Needed Some Breathing Room. I'd Already Been Translating French Poetry, I'd Been To Paris Once Before And Liked It Very Much, And So I Just Went.